Josh Brikis Leaves Poker to Focus on Family and Business

37-year old former professional cardplayer from Pennsylvania Josh Brikis retired from poker two years ago. Now, he decided to devote his time to his childhood passion, sports trading cards, and make his living with those. He spoke to Cardschat.com about his transition.

Brikis’ biggest results include coming in second in the 2009 WSOP $5,000 6-Max Hold’em (cashing for $619,608), finishing 55th in the Main Event next year ($138,285) and winning the $1,650 Borgata Poker Open for $119,034. 

However, his latest cash comes from over two years ago, when he earned $2,723 for the 130th spot in the 2015 WSOP $ 777 No Limit Hold'em “Lucky 7s” event. He also played in this year’s Main Event - as a recreational already this time -  but unfortunately did not make it in the money.

The retired poker pro have recently decided to try to make his living with a different deck of cards, sports trading cards.

He told Cardschat.com how sportscards was a dear hobby he shared with his father during his childhood. He strayed away from it in his teen years, but a few years ago his friend introduced him to “breaking”. Breaking is when a number of people pitch in to buy a full deck of sports cards together, and divide those among themselves - you can either claim a certain team beforehand, and then every player’s card from that team is yours; or decide to allocate the cards at random.

Brikis’ newly launched company lets you do just that, “breaking”, on a much larger level than how you would do it with a just few of your friends. He explains the concept in the video below in detail.

Brikis even drew a parallel between poker and sports card breaking in his interview.

“I actually have plenty of poker players that break with me. Because of the action, it compares to poker in some ways. You can break down the odds and compare the risk/reward for the price of the teams” - he told Cardschat.com.

But he also had more sinister things say later. At the end of his conversation, he told the poker site he wouldn’t recommend anyone playing poker as a profession, since it “makes a lot of people miserable a lot of the time”. Thankfully though, sports trading cards make Brikis feel very satisfied these days.